Letters to the Editor – UKIP’s General Election Address Dissected

UKIP’s General Election Address….how they’re going down on the doorstep

Well, it’s General Election time again. Busy activists have meant less frequent blog posts. A situation we aim to remedy before June 8th!

We like to respond to correspondence we receive which might be critical of the party, or raise questions about policy.

Recently, our candidate Paul Hickling’s election address (a leaflet posted to every household in the constituency by the Royal Mail) began hitting the city’s doormats. We’ve reproduced it below.

Recently, a voter contacted our UKIP General Election candidate Paul Hickling with a response to the points made on the reverse.

This is the branch’s response. The voter’s letter is in in italics and offset – our response is in parentheses.

Hi Paul, lets kick this off with a reply to your leaflet.

1/ IN RESPONSE TO ‘OUT OF CONTROL IMMIGRATION’ immigration, when Theresa May was Home Secretary she had her hands severely tied behind her back by the obscene EU Human rights.

This gave her very little ( if any ) room for making decisive decisions.

[This isn’t an EU Human Rights issue, it’s the EU ‘open borders’ policy. The Human Rights angle comes into play on residency status etc when the Home Secretary is trying to deport someone. It is not central to immigration policy. The Cameron government stated at the beginning of the coalition that they would reduce net migration down to the “tens of thousands”– “no ifs, no buts….our borders will be under control and net migration will be at levels we can manage”. All total lies and Cameron knew it. As Home Secretary, Theresa May knew she couldn’t do anything about it either, but stuck to the false narrative for her own political survival. Understandable perhaps, but hardly rooted in principle]

2/ IN RESPONSE TO ‘WASTING YOUR MONEY ON FOREIGN AID’ – foreign aid was introduced by Labour not Theresa. She has since said when elected she will put that budget to better use.

[Incorrect – ‘foreign aid’ has been present for decades, since the 1950’s at least, at about the time we were saying farewell to our former colonial possessions. This has steadily increased over the years and has been contentious both in terms of the projects it funded and the effectiveness of the results. Dambisa Moyo’s Book ‘Dead Aid’ is a well-written book on how aid to Africa has not just been ineffective but has actually made things worse in many instances. The Coalition government, in which Theresa May took a central role, enacted into legislation that 0.7% of GDP be automatically paid to this end, resulting in huge sums – over £12bn in 2015, being spent abroad – and all of this money is borrowed from future British taxpayers. It is created from nothing as debt for people who haven’t even been born yet. Yet the results of such extravagance are highly questionable, and serve merely to bolster the reputations of virtue-signalling politicians. The 0.7% target leads government officials to search desperately on things to spend the money on – the choice of many projects is ill-founded and results in waste, corruption and harm to the recipient nation. Promising to put the ‘budget to better use’ rings hollow.]

3/ IN RESPONSE TO ‘EUROPEAN HUMAN RIGHTS’ – the ECHR, Theresa has said she and her government will after Brexit, bring in a British bill of rights and thus dispense with the bungling Eurocrats who are unelected and stupid.

[Won’t happen any time soon though will it – almost certainly not in the 2017-22 parliament. That means we will be bound by the ECHR for a further five years at least. The Tory Manifesto says that we will not be bound by it, but is terribly vague, at best, about our withdrawl. Until May is specific about timing, the wording used on our address in justified]

4/ IN RESPONSE TO ‘BRITAIN’S FISHING WATERS’ – when Brexit is complete she will be able to bring back our fishing industry’s rights to fish our own waters.

[Not if she agrees to limit British fishing rights to 12 miles from the British coast, she won’t. There have been hints of backsliding by Mrs Slippery on this one. May has consistently failed to make any solid promises over British territorial waters. As a sovereign nation we should have the rights to fish stocks 200 miles offshore. To quote a recent article in the Daily Telegraph, ‘The Conservative party’s manifesto states the UK “will be fully responsible for the access and management of the waters where we have historically exercised sovereign control”. Trawlermen believe that might refer only to the 12-mile zone guaranteed under the 1964 London Fisheries Convention, as the 200-mile zone, agreed under a United Nations convention in 1982, was never implemented because of Britain’s EU membership.’ We need the full 200-mile zone back. Anything else would be a betrayal.]

5/ IN RESPONSE TO ‘NHS AND SOCIAL CARE CRISIS’ – don’t shoot the messenger, Theresa May did not start this abominable waste of tax payers money—– Labour did through the back door with Gordon Brown sneaking into Brussels and signing away our sovereign rights.

[Totally incorrect. Please bear in mind the following – the Tories took us into the then-EEC. It was the Tories who took us into the Single Market in 1986, and the Tories again who signed the Treaty of Maastricht in 1992, leading to ever-closer union with the EU. In fact, all told, the Tories probably did more to lead us into the EU than Labour did – in full knowledge the EU was heading towards a federal or unitary European State, with attendant cost implications. The UK has always been a net contributor to the rest of the EU – £0.5TN in total, in today’s money. Blaming Gordon Brown for having agreed to the Treaty of Lisbon in 2008 is rather an unbalanced viewpoint, to say the least. Most of the country’s sovereignty had already gone by then.]

6/ IN RESPONSE TO ‘OUR NATIONAL SECURITY UNDERMINED’ – Again you’ve got this wrong.

All of the cuts have been forced upon us by again Labour spending far more than we earn.

I found it profoundly disgusting to see a copy of the note left at the treasury offices when Labour were defeated at the 2010 Election. It said ( and I quote ) ‘Sorry chum, there’s no more money left’.

Looking hard at all the rhetoric being put out there, yours included, I have come to realise that the only person I will put my trust in is Theresa May and here Conservative government

[there is no doubting Labour’s fiscal irresponsibility. However, cutting front-line services was not necessary when there were other, non-essential areas of government spending that could have been axed, and still could be. Why for instance are we spending money on foreign aid pegged at 0.7% of GDP? EU regulation costs business £33bn+ every year . If we had not joined the EU disaster we could have averted many of the miscalculated ‘austerity’ approaches that have made our streets less safe.
In fact, we view Theresa May as being a continuation of the existing problems. She is largely bereft of the radical approaches necessary to dig us out of a very deep hole]

Disclaimer

The contents of this blog are the personal opinions of the contributors. They do not necessarily reflect UKIP policy; national or local, past or present. They are aired here purely for the purposes of debate.

We welcome contributions. If you are a UKIP member or activist and have some comments to make on party policy, activism or anything related, pleasecontact us.